The Hitman Collection

Games are very good at satisfying fantasy violence and elaborate, gory executions are commonplace. These animations are partly there to shock and illicit that wincing "oof" when you watch your character dismember some unfortunate guard, but they are also there to make your moments of victory in a combat encounter stand out from the rest of the melee. A satisfying, decisive takedown is a release valve that gives you a moment to regroup before the fight resumes.

They are also useful for establishing character. Fight choreography can be used to say a lot about your avatar's mindset. Jackie in the Darkness 2 is sadistic, and worryingly inventive with his demon arms, as though he has spent far too much time thinking about how to use them. In Shadow of Mordor, Talion is quick and decisive with his deathblows—the technique of a warrior used to fighting many enemies at once. Agent 47 is efficient and wastes no energy on flair, as you would expect from a seasoned professional.

We started discussing memorable melee attack and takedowns that work particularly well in the context of the game world in which they feature. Violence in games rarely analysed. It is discussed in terms of 'is this bad?' rather than 'how did they make this so satisfying?' Here is a collection of games that do it well. Warning: if you don't want to see lots of pretend polygonal NPCs get beaten up, shot, and stabbed (a lot) look away now.

Kicking guards in Dark Messiah of Might & Magic

Dark Messiah of Might & Magic delighted in the Source engine's ragdoll physics systems, and integrated them into its combat system with the excellent kick move. Booted foes fly through the air, taking out destructible terrain and getting stuck on spikes. Might & Magic's levels find many contrived ways for you to finish fights using this signature melee attack. Those spiky panels are everywhere.

Hammer takedowns in Hitman: Blood Money

Hitman is, of course, all about killing people in horrible ways, but there is something especially mean about the hammer attack in Hitman: Blood Money. Perhaps its the directness of the attack, combined with the use of such an ordinary everyday tool, that makes it so effective. Agent 47's animations all express a psychopathic nonchalance that well befits a contract killer.

Transhuman takedowns in Deus Ex: Human Revolution

Jensen's melee attacks demand so much energy that you might not see all of his takedown animations. They are remarkably elaborate and inventive. The developers had to create a fighting style for a guy who can shoot blades out of his wrists and elbows—a futuristic martial art. Some of the moves are comedic—the double headbutt is great—but the one where Jensen unhinges his hand and spins it to throw his enemy is so crazy and alien it sells Jensen as the terrifying futuristic commando he's supposed to be.

Teamwork takedowns in Batman: Arkham Knight

There is an outstanding level in Arkham Knight when Batman teams up with Robin to infiltrate a hideout. You can switch between characters, order each other about and join forces to beat up the Joker's goons. The Arkham games use Batman's brutish takedown animations to sell his powerful, direct method of fighting. The co-op takedowns take this to another level, contrasting Batman and Robin's styles in moments of superheroic teamwork. The Arkham games use slow motion to create snapshot moments that look like living comic book panels.

Everything Ezio does in Assassin's Creed: Brotherhood

Every weapon type in Brotherhood has its own set of complex multi-foe takedowns that Ezio executes with dazzling, horrifying efficiency. The Assassin's Creed games always feature spectacular choreography but Brotherhood's takedowns are particularly elegant, often using aggressor's momentum and weapons against other enemies. Ezio is skilled, but he is only human, so Brotherhood's combat relies on technical martial prowess rather than absurd feats of strength (see Deus Ex: Human Revolution and the Batman Arkham games for that). There is obviously a lot of martial arts expertise on the development team, and the resulting takedowns really sell the idea of the assassin as a master of all weapons.

Knife assassinations in Dishonored 2

Violence is a form of catharsis in a revenge fantasy, and Dishonored 2's gory knife finishers are a grisly vector for Corvo and Emily's fury. Dishonored's art style produces guards with of an almost caricature appearance. Their features are exaggerated and they are unusually expressive. This, combined with the close first-person perspective, makes these executions uncomfortably intimate. They are pretty graphic, but the violence of Dishonored 2's executions add extra weight to the lethal/nonlethal decisions at the heart of the game.

Decapitation in Middle-Earth: Shadow of Mordor

Being and Orc in Shadow of Mordor has to be one of the worst jobs going in PC gaming. Talion is absolutely merciless. Shadow of Mordor's take on the Arkham knight combat system benefits from the addition of a very sharp sword and a dismemberment system. The flash of a blade, backed up by some excellent slashy sword noises, sells the execution. There are no Legolas-style flourishes here, only the straightforward aggression of a trained soldier looking for the fastest killing blow possible.

Hitman: Blood Money was, for a long time, a pinnacle of sandbox stealth games. Each level had a dizzying number of possibilities for assassinating your targets. For its time, the AI felt intimidatingly complex, and learning to navigate through all the layers of guards and NPCs and their various interactions was tense. So watching all of that fall to pieces as speedrunner 'Saintmillion' beat the game in 36 minutes by exploiting the hell out of the AI is one of the highlights of the Awesome Games Done Quick speedrunning marathon happening this week. I'll never see Hitman: Blood Money the same way again.

Adding insult to injury, Saintmillion demonstrated how utterly breakable Blood Money can be as a Silent Assassin on Professional, its hardest difficulty. The former means that he can't blow his cover, leave any witnesses, bodies, or equipment behind, can't be seen on camera, and can't kill innocents without making it look like an accident. The latter means he's doing all of that against AI enemies in top form—they're more assertive, aggressive, and do more damage. For someone like me, it's an almost unfathomable challenge. For Saintmillion, it's a walk in the park.

Although the first mission gets off to a rough start as Saintmillion gets busted by a guard, which takes place in a cocaine factory disguised as a winery, it's otherwise an effortless, two-minute sprint. With impeccable timing and understanding of where the some-odd 30 NPCs could be at any one time, Saintmillion kills his two targets and blitzes through the level.

But as the speedrun progresses, things go from impressive to downright ridiculous. Stealth games often depend on a sense of immersion. Players need to believe that the guards who patrol the area aren't just robots following an automated path, but people. That's why the Hitman series has always gone to great lengths in making characters seem unpredictable and human. Saintmillion's speedrun shatters that illusion in hilarious ways.

The metaphorical hammer breaking Blood Money's sense of difficulty is Agent 47's coin. While his guns might seem like his most prized tools, Saintmillion quickly explains that the coin is the source for his godly ability to infiltrate any level. "The coin in this run is really broken," Saintmillion explains. "When you throw a coin at people and they don't see you hold the coin, they just do what's next in their patrol scheme—or series of things they were doing."

Using this simple trick, Saintmillion is able to exploit just about any guard into doing exactly what he wants. One minute they're about to attack him for trespassing and the next they're fixed intently on the shiny piece of change laying on the ground as if nothing ever happened. My favorite use of the coin happens at 39:24 in the video above (25:16 in the speedrun) during the mission, A House of Cards. Agent 47's third target is Sheik Mohammad Bin Faisal Al-Khalifa who is followed by two armed guards everywhere he goes. But Saintmillion has a hilariously simple solution.

It's one of the few moments I burst out laughing during Awesome Games Done Quick. The way everyone in the room stops to look at Agent 47 holding a coin is just so ridiculous.

Saintmillion's speedrun is full of these moments that make the whole thing worth a watch from start to finish, like throwing a coin at a glass ceiling so that it shatters and kills two targets at the same time. But my favorite comes later, during the mission You Better Watch Out, when he is forced to cruelly gun down a small dog. Why? "I have to kill the dog," he explains. "The dog is a witness and I will not get Silent Assassin because the dog will tell the police." That's not hyperbole either, as this guide suggests players need to, at the very least, sedate the animal prior to the assassination. But hey, speed is a factor here. Besides, it fits nicely with AGDQ's inside joke of "kill the animals."

So far, this has been one of my favorite speedruns done at AGDQ. While speedrunning is always an incredible feat, it's especially satisfying seeing someone trivialize what was once considered an amazing stealth game. If you have your own favorite moments from AGDQ so far, let us know in the comments.

NOW PLAYING

In Now Playing articles PC Gamer writers talk about the game currently dominating their spare time. Today Lorna Reid goes to the opera in Hitman: Blood Money.

Throwing myself down an opulent corridor in a hail of bullets, dressed as a painter, was not how I pictured my return to Hitman: Blood Money. As I stumble down a flight of stairs, still holding a bloody hammer, I m forced to concede that picking a lock in plain view of a guard wasn t a good idea. Nor was using the hammer in the undignified kerfuffle that followed.

In light of the new game s release, and with its Paris Showstopper shredding me, I decided to return to arguably the Hitman series crowning glory. And I just had to pick the Paris Opera House, didn t I?

Feet that had been so used to the layout of the grand building suddenly falter in the labyrinth of passages. Where the hell am I? Why is there inadequate signage? In the event of a fire, this place would be an outrageous death trap. The irony.

I m too busy getting worked up about Parisian health and safety standards to pay attention to where I m going, and get stuck in a door that opens inwards rather than outwards. I m turned into a bullet sponge. Again. My time in the Opera House is a three-act farce, more lethal to my self-esteem than I am to my two targets.

As my former prowess with the game fails to materialise I keep going back for more, working towards an ending where my targets, not me, get carted off in body-bags. This time I decide to stay out of trouble hah by engineering an accident, and set off to sabotage the winch for the chandelier, tucked away at the top of the opera house. One little problem... I can t find it. I only have to go up. How hard can that be? Staggeringly, it seems. I yank open doors, alarm guards, barge into the ladies dressing room and retreat amid a shower of screams. I pick locks and swear at staircases that go the wrong way. Fate and a shitty sense of direction conspire against me and I end up accidentally killing someone in a toilet before being gunned down by guards.

Restarting, and this time attempting to be a smart arse, I disguise myself as an actor, complete with a fake World War I pistol. I appear on stage as an executioner, hitting my mark beautifully. Then, in an unforgivable bit of overacting, I accidentally shoot my target a second time. My cover s blown. Shots erupt around me, I stumble off stage, and, in the ensuing chaos, inadvertently discover the door I d previously spent an age searching for. Feeling a Basil Fawltyesque meltdown coming on, I rattle up flights of steps to the roof space of the auditorium and find myself near the bloody winch room. There s no time to whip anything with a Silverballer because, in my frustrated rage, I slip off a gantry and die an ignoble death on the stairwell below.

As an assassin and an actor I ve failed. Worst of all, I died wearing an embarrassing moustache.

Despite the curtains closing on yet another of Agent 47 s lives, I couldn t help but conclude that Blood Money s sense of fun remains. I may have failed multiple times but I enjoyed it. I also learned that you should never send Frank Spencer to do an Agent s job.

Any time a new Hitman [official site] game rolls around, I need to know the answer to one question: can I royally screw basically everything up and get away with it? Not for me the Silent Assassin, but more a series of pratfalls, murders performed inadvertently in plain sight, panicked costume changes and awkward scuffles, inevitably culminating in a desperate sprint to the exit with a chain of armed and extremely angry guards pursuing me. So I am delighted to discover that the new Hitman game supports this kind of rolling disaster.

I even managed to complete a mission which began with me choking a man unconscious in front of roughly 200 people who I somehow hadn’t realised were watching me.

Square Enix has a pretty massive sale on its online store at the moment. In keeping with the spirit of Black Friday, the publisher has discounted a tonne of its back catalogue, but more importantly, you can get discounts on preorders too. More important than either of those, though, is that you can download Hitman 2: Silent Assassinfor zero dollars.

Just head over to the website, make an account, 'purchase' Hitman 2: Silent Assassin and then use the code FreeSilentAssassin when you check out. While you're there you can get 10% discounts on preorders for Just Cause 3 and the new Hitman, among other titles.

Below you will find the 25 best stealth games ever released on PC. There are sneaking missions, grand thefts, assassinations, escapes and infiltrations. Stay low, keep quiet and we’ll make it to the end.

The first couple minutes of Hitman: Agent 47 are pretty much a video game cutscene, with grainy video and voiceover talking about secret and bad human research. The segment s purpose is to explain, Hey, this is a video game movie, and it s about genetically modified hitmen, and you re just going to have to deal with that. It s cool if you re late to the movie, though, because they explain all this in the clearest terms possible again about halfway through.

But who cares about the story? I watched Hitman: Agent 47 to judge whether or not Agent 47 is a good hitman. A good hitman, at least in the Hitman games, is one who succeeds at killing his targets with as few witnesses as possible, ideally without killing anyone but the targets. Sure, you can go nuts if you want, but stealth is encouraged, so that s the standard I m holding the movie version of Agent 47 to. With that in mind, I've graded his performance in the film's major action scenes. He did badly, as you'll see.

Obviously, reading about every action scene in a movie is going to lead to some spoilers, if you care.

Nighttime fight

As the movie starts, Agent 47 is out to get some bad guys, and you better believe he s gonna get them. First off, why can no one in the film industry design a UI that anyone would actually use? Agent 47 literally presses a button that says upload virus at one point. Then he tracks the bad guy cars with the Watch Dogs companion app while they all fumble with their infected, also stupid interfaces.

Pretty quickly, it s clear that our friend 47 is doing a bad job. He kills so many dudes he doesn't have to. He even shoots two guys sitting at bad-UI computer terminals and then props them up as if they re still working just so the other bad guys will get mad at them for not responding, discover that they re dead, and then see him emerge from the shadows. That s just rude as hell, and not very sneaky at all. F.

"Hm, looks good, looks good, can we get thirty more red squares though?"

Subway fight

This showdown is set up when the camera pans through the ground, letting the audience know that subways are underground, as Agent 47 chases Zachary Quinto. So, Agent 47 and Zachary Quinto (who I ve decided is a character in the film for simplicity s sake) are fighting in a subway station, on the tracks, and the camera is shaking big time. We know martial arts, they yell into each other s faces at the same time, but they don t really. They just know how to work with direction that obscures the details of a bad fight.

There is a cool bit where Agent 47 almost, but doesn t, get killed by an oncoming train—remember that, from The Matrix?—but as a hitman he does very badly. Everyone in the subway station sees him. He shoots bullets into all kinds of crowds. There s no way he isn t being chased by law enforcement. F.

Mass panic doesn't typically indicate a stealthy approach.

Military fight

Next there s a part where Agent 47 walks into a heavily guarded military complex covered with guns. The metal detector and X-ray scanner detect all of these, another thing that happened in The Matrix, but instead of killing all the guards with sick moves, he lets himself get captured so that he can use his sick moves on everyone later. Getting captured is not a good hitman thing to do, even if you plan to escape later, but especially if you plan to escape later by loudly shooting people. F.

Look at my guns, I have many.

Jet engine fight

This is a prolonged fight involving a jet engine, and it isn t bad. Some dudes even get sucked into the jet engine, which almost approaches the creativity you'd see in an actual Hitman mission. And Agent 47 is a little stealthy here, sneaking up behind people and killing them with stuff he finds lying around, which shows improvisation and stealthiness. Still, he almost dies and is only saved by the villain s fatal flaw: pride. You can t always count on a villain to have a fatal flaw, 47. Sometimes they re just regular guys. D+.

This is a little bit sneaky!

Audi RS 7 chase

This is the best scene because it stars an Audi RS 7 drifting around the bends of a parking garage and killing the hell out of a bunch of motorcycle jerks chasing it. I guess Agent 47 is driving it, but let's just pretend the Audi is its own character with its own motivation.

I really felt the Audi s pain when it was being shot full of cables from rooftop bad guys, who held it in place with their evil grapples, and then tried to zipline down the cables to kill Agent 47. No one mourns the Audi, but I suppose they don't have time what with bad guys coming from every direction. It turns out, those zipline guys made a bad mistake. They could have just shot at Agent 47 from the relative safety of the rooftops, but instead they get all plugged by his dual handguns while slowly descending. This happens in the middle of the street. Everyone sees it and Agent 47 is not stealthy at all. Also, he picks up Hannah Ware and carries her through streets full of people and no one cares and that's dumb. F.

Holding one gun is hard enough, two is just impossible!

Skyscraper fight

This is a cool scene, because it involves helicopters and the roof of a skyscraper—you might say that the final gunshot was an exclamation mark—and Hannah Ware finally becomes the badass she secretly was the whole time. It s also the most visually arresting scene, with 47 s white shirt losing its edges against the impossibly white walls of an evil office building, which was the signature technique of one of my favorite American illustrators, Coles Phillips. Meanwhile, most of the rest of the movie oozes with all style of stock art: Bald man uses laptop. Depressed woman s empty pill bottle rolls across the floor. Establishing shot of car.

Anyway, it s fun to look at, but is Agent 47 finally a good hitman here, at the end? No way. He comes up with a convoluted plan to hit his man, sure, but everyone is looking at him like, I know who you are, you are a hitman, and I have seen your face. That s just not good hitman work. F.

None of this is very sneaky at all.

So, is it a good movie?

Not really. I ve tried not to spoil the details of the plot because the only thing it has going for it is a couple misdirections. Other than that, it s pretty boring. Turns out an emotionless dude with a moderately close head shave is not very exciting to watch any time he s not shooting people.

Zachary Quinto is also boring, and doesn t convince me that he is a tough man, though he tries. Hannah Ware plays the best of the characters, because she s allowed to express feelings with her face, but the story doesn t let her be much more than a human MacGuffin. She appears at the beginning in a movie-ready state: a woman whose only defining qualities are plot points, like Lisbeth Salander if all we knew about her was that she has a dragon tattoo, and that the tattoo is a treasure map.

And that d all be fine if Agent 47 had James Bond or John Wick or The Raid levels of style and choreography, but it only timidly approaches those films to ask if it can borrow some of their stuff, and then breaks their stuff. Daniel Craig s contemplative rooftop swim in Skyfall, for instance, said a little about his headspace, and was a damn cool establishing scene. In this movie, Ware takes a nighttime dip in a hotel pool for no reason. I guess she s swimming because she s… upset… about the hitman?

This important scene establishes that the hotel has a swimming pool.

Meanwhile, even with John Wick's David Leitch on staff, the action is good but never exceptional. Hitman is so concerned with making sure its characters look badass that it s often cut like a trailer, obscuring the greater form of the fights, and the complete windup and follow-through of each movement. The Matrix, on the other hand, shows us the full breadth of every dumb flip, kick, punch, block, and grimace in that subway scene. It s silly, and not really convincing, but it's still a wonder to watch all that continuous action and reaction. In Equilibrium, Christian Bale looks super dumb doing gunkata forms, but he doesn t give a crap, and not giving a crap is what makes him so cool. There's no attempt to obscure his choreography, allowing the action to be unreal and goofy and way more fun to watch.

There is some cool action choreography in Hitman, for sure, and I spotted not one but two helicopters in it, but that s all it has to offer. Helicopters, a good car chase, and a bit of good gunplay. Otherwise, the sentimental bits are entirely inert, the plot consists of cutscenes I'd skip in a game, and rather than being cool and effortlessly badass, Agent 47 seems like a self-conscious Bond impersonator. Check it out, guys, I just got out of this big fight, and what do I do? I just casually adjust my sleeve. Is that cool? It was cool when Bond did it but is it cool when I do it? Ah, it's cool, yep. I'm cool.

Absolution might be a fitting tag for what looks like a return to form and a casting off of the sins of the past, but since that subtitle’s already taken, I’m hoping I’ll be able to justify referring to this one as Hitman: Redemption [official site]. So far, the signs are good. I spent some time in the company of IO Interactive’s studio head, Hannes Seifert, as he played through a mission set at a Paris fashion show. As he manipulated NPCs behaviour and demonstrated some emergent possibilities, Seifert said all the right things about recovering the best of the series’ past. The game – this portion of it at least – backs him up convincingly. It’s looking good.>